Manipulating light and color with soft and structured matter

Investigations of nature’s most fascinating light manipulation strategies can inspire design concepts for synthetic, hierarchically structured, functional optical materials and devices. While soft and fluid matter frequently enables tunable and stimuli-responsive optical characteristics in biological photonic systems, soft and fluid components still represent an underutilized class of materials in the optical engineers’ toolbox. My group tries to understand how organisms grow and form light-manipulating material architectures to translate useful biological design concepts into bioinspired dynamic optical materials. In this presentation, I will briefly discuss our efforts on visualizing butterfly scale structure formation and will then focus on the manufacture of bio-inspired dynamic photonic materials with nano-scale feature control and macroscale area throughput.